From Neuron to Assembly: Neuronal Organization and Stimulus Representation

Abstract

The study of information processing in the sensory nervous system may be viewed as an investigation of images. Let us consider, for instance, the auditory nervous system. Throughout the auditory system, starting at the hair cells in the cochlea and the auditory nerve fibres, through the various stages of the auditory processor, composed of the numerous individual neurons with their different patterns of interconnections, we have what might be called “the neural image of sound” in its different realizations. The external world is paralleled by an internal representation (e.g., Craik 1943, McCulloch 1965). The acoustic environment of an animal, consisting of patterns of air pressure variations at the external ears, is represented and transformed internally by a network of neurons which communicate by complex spatio-temporal patterns of action potentials, the all-or-none events generated by the individual neurons.